Carry Memories with You (and I'll Never Leave)
by youaretoosmart
Summary: "Stiles, Stiles, Stiles." The name rings strangely on her tongue, rolls around her mouth as the vowels stretch and echo in the stillness. The word loses all meaning after a few dozen seconds, strips down of all the identity ever built behind it. / Stiles gets taken. Lydia remembers. / 6x01, written pre-s6.


**Forgive the canon divergences, but it was written just after the trailer was released, back in July! I just realized I forgot to import it from AO3 to here. Based on one of slowburnotptrash's posts.**

 **Title from "Don't Let Me Go" by Raign.**

* * *

"Close your eyes," he says finally, and his hand leaves hers. "Don't look at them. "

"They're coming," she says, and it's not a question. "Stiles—"

But she closes her eyes. She feels him move in front of her, hesitate maybe an instant and place a kiss on her forehead.

"I love you," he whispers against her temple, his breath making the thin hair flutter on her face.

She reaches for him but she can't touch him; already, the door of the jeep has opened and closed. If she strains her ears, she can perceive his footsteps on the hard ground of the parking lot.

Then the heavy and dreaded gallop of the supernatural echoes in her head.

Lydia wants to scream.

* * *

A lifetime later, she opens her eyes.

The jeep is empty, save for herself and a thousand and one proofs of Stiles' existence. The keys are still in the ignition, and she knows that if she tugs the glove compartment open, receipts for the last six months will fall in her lap. Her hand brushes against the back of his seat, still warm from him.

The parking lot is silent. It's the silence that hits Lydia the most, a heavy, cruel silence that curls deep in her stomach and quickens her breathing.

 _The auditory sense is the first part of the nervous system_.

Lydia is well accustomed to letting her hearing lead her.

She slams the door shut to break the numbness that is starting to spread from her head to her toes, but the sound only reinforces the lack of noise. The lack of life. The lack of Stiles.

 _You'll forget me_ , he'd said. His eyes had been desperately resigned, and she had wanted to hold him back, with her hands, with her lips, with her words. She could only make a promise they both knew wasn't in her power.

 _I won't_ , she'd said, but she could see that, as much as he wanted to, he couldn't fully believe her.

She unknowingly licks her lips, and the powdery taste of her smudged lipstick is enough to rouse her from stupor.

"Stiles!" she tries to shout, although she knows it's useless; her voice breaks and she can only croak the first syllable. Her voice, usually so assertive, so loud and destructive, can only whisper a second time.

She doesn't know if she can laugh at the irony. The thought of screaming for Stiles sends her in a panic and makes her want to take off after the riders in her heeled boots.

 _It's the glutamate going through the body_ , her brain tries to tell her.

It's Stiles being taken by supernatural, spectral riders and getting erased from all of their memories.

She doesn't know how she makes it to her own car, but the thought hits her again with full force as she starts the engine. For a moment, his face comes up blurred; the memory of the tender shape of his eyes, of him looking at her with his earnest expression and his heart on his sleeve, escapes her.

"Remember," she whispers to herself, her hand hovering uncertainly over the blinker as she hesitates, for one painfully long second, on the way to his house. "Remember," she exhales once. Twice. "Remember. Remember."

Her voice is shaky with unrepressed tears; she lets them fall freely and feels her heart beating still too quickly. She is far too used to tears and death and loss, by now. But losing memories of Stiles, when she's been storing them, analysing them and practically only living through them for so long, is a new kind of ache. Her heart doesn't know how to process it, not yet, and Lydia finds herself wishing it didn't need to learn to, ever.

She parks briskly in front of the Stilinski house, and she certainly spends too long staring at his window with the blinds pulled down, heart beating on her lips.

The blue painted door looks nearly black under the yellow rays of the distant streetlamp, and the homy feeling of the neighborhood makes her want to scream. The world is calm and smells of the end of winter; leaves rustle gently under the chilly wind. She can even see stars, blinking sleepily through the clouds over her head.

She strains her ears to pick up on the sound that stills haunts her, but the horses are already far away, and their hooves haunt another part of the world.

The spare key is still at the same place, hidden under a loose floorboard of the porch. Lydia takes it with hands that she will not to shake, in vain. She has to try twice before opening the door, and then her movements to hide the key back and close the door are painfully careful.

She's started to feel lightheaded from dread.

She doesn't glance at the rest of the house as she makes her way through the hallway, the living room, to the stairs, plunged into darkness. She takes deep breaths through the nose and exhales through the mouth, as she's told Stiles to do during a panic attack.

The thought of that day sends her in a frenzy of worry again, and she has to clutch the bannister for a moment, scrunching up her face to stop crying.

But she has to see. She has to see his room, the traces of his existence, solid proofs that an eighteen-year-old boy with warm eyes, messy hair, and a body dotted in moles still exists.

Has ever existed.

The door is still here. _Of course the door is still there_ , the cynical and scientific part of her brain tells her. It's a door. _It won't disappear overnight_.

Not like… Stiles? did.

"Remember," she says to herself again as she steels herself. She cannot let her brain hesitate and stutter his name like that. "Stiles, Stiles, Stiles."

The name rings strangely on her tongue, rolls around her mouth as the vowels stretch and echo in the stillness. The word loses all meaning after a few dozen seconds, strips down of all the identity ever built behind it.

 _What the hell is a stiles?_ Lydia wonders for a moment.

She slides her hand in her purse, searching for something, anything that can help her let Stiles be part of this word. She finds, maybe unconsciously, paper and a pen, and she begins to write, pressing against the wall, before she even makes the decision.

 _Has brown eyes_ , she writes, _upside-down smile._ _Likes blue; supports the Mets; loves Scott like a brother._

 _Loves me._

The pen hesitates here, even though Lydia can still hear him whisper those three words in her hair. _I love you_ , he said, and that was that; Lydia couldn't say anything back, because he'd been gone in the next breathe.

She couldn't say it then, but she can write it now.

 _I love him_ , she nearly draws in the paper, in big and deep letters; the pen runs out of ink before she can trace the "m" properly.

 _His lacrosse number is 24_ , she continues in her head, clutching the paper in her hand as she draws closer to the door, _green is for solved, yellow is to be determined, red is unsolved_.

 _Blue's just pretty._

The room on the other side of the door is empty.

The blinds are broken, like those of an unused, old, closed room. Dust settles in the room and swirls in the pale light of the streetlamp; Lydia's boots make an obscene clear mark in the door frame.

The door slams behind her as she takes one, two steps back and falls against the wall, unable to repress the tears. The paper she holds in her hand crumples with a shrieking sound over her sobbing.

She presses against the wall as if wishing to be absorbed—the solid presence is nearly reassuring, if anything can be so at that moment. She feels the world crumbling down around her, but the unthinking, hard wall stands still behind her back, with the skirting board pressing in the small of her back, her boots skidding across the floor.

She cries.

* * *

Lydia leaves the house before the Sheriff comes back, and she feels like locking her heart in the dark room when she turns the key one last time and drops it under the floorboard.

She drives back in silence, tears rolling down her face even if they seem more and more pointless as the houses on every side of the house grow bigger and wealthier, the street wider and quieter, more brightly lit.

When she pulls in her drive, illuminated by the large windows from the kitchen, the paper is completely blank.

Lydia can barely feel the scratch marks, where the pen traced the word "love".

* * *

 **Thanks for reading! I'm also youaretoosmart on tumblr and cave_canem on AO3.**


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